Chemistry
jstemwedel | December 4, 2008I was marveling at the Chemistry gift guide at MAKE. It has lots of cool items for your budding chemist/mad scientist of any age looking to equip his or her basement/garage/treehouse laboratory. (It's pretty hard to get fume-hoods installed in a treehouse, but who are we kidding? Most people who dabble in chemistry at home don't have fume-hoods either.)
The glassware in the pictures is so bright and shiny. (Flashback to the "breakage book" in my high school chemistry class. Also to the hours upon hours of washing glassware in grad school. Still: shiny!) The kids in the pictures from…
sporte | November 29, 2008It's a long, long, weekend; perfect for going outside and doing a few loud, messy experiments. Cooking-intensive holidays always remind me how much fun it is to do a bit of chemistry, especially when it comes to food.
If you watched the video that I posted on Thanksgiving, you've probably been itching to try one of these experiments yourself.
Some chemistry experiments are better in the spring, especially if you're using peeps, but experiments with candy and soda pop can happen anytime.
If you'd like to give these sorts of experiments a try, the Disgruntled Chemist posted a truly…
sporte | November 27, 2008If you're not cooking today, why not experiment? Here's something fun you can do with Mentos and Diet Coke - and for those of you who think these experiments are too messy, you can still watch the movie.
Enjoy the music in the video, then go outside, and enjoy the show. Later, go to EepyBird.com and learn about the science behind the fountain effect.
technorati tags: Mentos and Diet Coke, chemistry, science you can do at home
jstemwedel | November 26, 2008For years, you've heard the tremendous fatigue experienced after an American Thanksgiving dinner laid at the feet of the turkey -- or more precisely, at the tryptophan in that turkey. Trytophan, apparently, is the go-to amino acid for those who want to get sleepy.
But according to an article in the Los Angeles Times, the real story may be more complicated than that:
Turkey does contain a large amino acid called tryptophan. So eating turkey puts some tryptophan into your bloodstream. But there are lots of other large amino acids riding around in there too.
For the tryptophan in turkey to do…
jstemwedel | October 23, 2008Given that today is Mole Day, it seemed only fair to follow up on our earlier experimentation with avocados. You may recall that, in discussing our efforts to dissolve avocados, we said:
One further experiment we've decided to try at some future point is to investigate whether we can make mayonnaise substituting mashed avocado for some or all of the oil.
That future point? Now a past point.
Before I report the results from our kitchen, let's talk a little about mayonnaise.
Mayonnaise is traditionally made up of oil, egg, and lemon juice (or something equivalent).
You know oil and…
jstemwedel | October 23, 2008This is National Chemistry Week. It's always chosen to coincide with whichever calendar week includes October 23 (or 10/23), since October 23 is "Mole Day".
"Huh? Why would chemists celebrate a furry critter that burrows underground?"
Not that mole. The mole chemists celebrate is a unit.
1 mole = 6.02 x 1023 of whatever it is you want a mole of.
You can think of a mole as being sort of the chemists' equivalent of a dozen -- it's a convenient sized bundle for working with the kind of stuff chemists work with, namely, atoms and molecules. If they were working with eggs, or shoes, or some…
jwilbanks | October 23, 2008I'm at a workshop on eChemistry today, and we were asked to prepare position statements. I'm not going to blog the conference - it's a private thing - but figured I would post my position statement here.
We were asked to answer some questions. I chose to answer this one: "do you assess the potential of new web-based communication models in Chemistry, i.e. their benefits or liabilities, their transformational power, and their chance of success?"
Full text is after the jump.
A good place to start is the transformation of scholarly communication from "using the internet" to "existing in…
terrasig | October 17, 2008Scott Hensley, editor of the WSJ Health Blog, just reminded me that his colleague and blog lead writer, Jacob Goldstein, put together a neat slideshow on the fluorescent marine proteins for which this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded. I've been a bit behind in my reading of other blogs so it was refreshing to see this nicely accessible coverage.
The WSJ blog post, The Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the Beauty of Fluorescent Protein, has the slideshow embedded. You may also go directly to the slideshow here.
(h/t Scott Hensley)
jstemwedel | October 15, 2008Dear Sarah Gardner and Marketplace producers,
I listened with interest to your story on today's show about the current prospects for the solar energy sector. While the story was engaging, I have a nit to pick.
In the course of listing the elemental components of photovoltaic solar panels, you referred to them as part of "that periodic table you were supposed to have memorized" in high school chemistry.
As I've mentioned before, it is not standard practice to memorize the periodic table (or to make students memorize it). They hang it there in the classroom, for goodness sake! Why waste the…
terrasig | October 13, 2008Much hoo-hah in the local fishwrapper regarding the installation yesterday of Dr Holden Thorp as Chancellor of the state's flagship university, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (installation address here). Thorp has brought a large degree of enthusiasm and optimism to Chapel Hill with his numerous and diverse accomplishments to date as well as his vision and youth - he has turned 44 during the time between his appointment and installation yesterday.
My scientific colleagues at UNC-CH have been giddy with Thorp's appointment as he is himself a scientist: his appointment is in…
sb admin | October 8, 2008On the Googles, Common Knowledge gets more than 25,000,000 hits. It's a market research company, a scholarship foundation, a non profit fundraising firm, and in its inverse as Uncommon Knowledge part of a conservative group site, and an interview series at the Hoover Institution.
We can take the Wikipedia entry:Common knowledge is what "everybody knows", usually with reference to the community in which the term is used.
or we can take an anti-plagiarism guide to heart:
The two criteria that are most commonly used in deciding whether or not something is common knowledge relate to quantity…
terrasig | October 8, 2008Nature's gift of green fluorescent protein (GFP) from the jellyfish, Aequorea victoria, has always been important to me, personally and professionally. In fact, PharmGirl, MD, and I would have never met if not for this wonder macromolecule nor then would PharmKid exist.
Well, it appears that GFP has been of enough important to others that the three scientists central to its discovery and development were just awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry:
Osamu Shimomura (Woods Hole and Boston University) first isolated GFP from the jellyfish Aequorea victoria, which drifts with the currents off…
jstemwedel | September 30, 2008I suspect I'm late to the party on this one, but I just had occasion to check out The Periodic Table of Videos produced at the University of Nottingham. It's a collection of 118 short videos (ranging in length from approximately one to ten minutes each), one for each of the elements currently in the Periodic Table of the Elements.
I did not watch all 118 of them, but the ones that I did watch covered, among other things:
What mercury has to do with doorbells.
What molybdenum has to do with beans.
What sulfur has to do with Silly Putty.
What lead has to do with submarines.
What fluorine *…
terrasig | September 30, 2008This morning's post from Molecule of the Day reminds me to ask "cyanuric acid question."
With the recent adulterations with melamine of Chinese milk and milk products (like White Rabbit chocolates) and foods with other milk-derived ingredients, we wonder if we will ultimately hear that a compound from fertilizer, cyanuric acid, is part of the mix.
Melamine is a cheap chemical that gives a false positive in typical protein assays; therefore, it can be used to make food appear to contain more protein than it actually does. You'll often hear of cyanuric acid being referred to as a pool chemical…
jstemwedel | September 29, 2008You know how graduate students are always complaining that their stipends are small compared to the cost of living? It seems that some graduate students find ways to supplement that income ... ways that aren't always legal. For example, from this article in the September 8, 2008 issue of Chemical & Engineering News [1]:
Jason D. West, a third-year chemistry graduate student at the University of California, Merced, was arraigned last month on charges of conspiring to manufacture methamphetamine, manufacturing methamphetamine, and possessing stolen property. West allegedly stole…
jstemwedel | September 26, 2008Yesterday, we had an urge to do some experimentation and I had a red cabbage that had overstayed its welcome in the refrigerator crisper drawer.
So of course, we made cabbage-water indicator.
An indicator is a substance that produces a color change that gives you information about whether the stuff you're testing with it is acidic, basic, or neutral. Some indicators have just two states. For example, phenolphthalein, the indicator beloved by chemistry students (in part because of the fun of spelling it), is frequently used to find the equivalence point in acid-base titrations. In acidic…
terrasig | September 20, 2008Dr Ernest Eliel, a past-president of the American Chemical Society, passed away in Chapel Hill, NC, on Thursday evening. Dr Eliel was 86.
His obituary notes:
Born December 28, 1921, in Cologne, Germany, Dr. Eliel was the son of the late Oskar and Luise Tietz Eliel. He moved to the United States in 1946, and received a Ph.D degree from the University of IL at Urbana-Champaign in 1948. Dr. Eliel lived in South Bend, IN, where he taught at the University of Notre Dame from 1948 until 1972, at which time he moved to Chapel Hill, where he was the W.R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Chemistry at the…
jstemwedel | September 18, 2008Back in June, I wrote a post examining the Hellinga retractions. That post, which drew upon the Chemical & Engineering News article by Celia Henry Arnaud (May 5, 2008) [1], focused on the ways scientists engage with each other's work in the published literature, and how they engage with each other more directly in trying to build on this published work. This kind of engagement is where you're most likely to see one group of scientists reproduce the results of another -- or to see their attempts to reproduce these results fail. Given that reproducibilty of results is part of what…
jstemwedel | September 10, 2008In the August 25, 2008 issue of Chemical & Engineering News, there's an interview with Carol Henry (behind a paywall). Henry is a consultant who used to be vice president for industry performance programs at the American Chemistry Council (ACC). In the course of the interview, Henry laid out a set of standards for doing research that she thinks all scientists should adopt. (Indeed, these are the standards that guided Henry in managing research programs for the California Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Energy, the American Petroleum Institute, and ACC.)
Here are…
terrasig | August 28, 2008A couple of colleagues turned me on the other morning to a press release by researchers at the University of Warwick who recently published in PNAS that their data apparently overturns the Meyer-Overton Rule regarding solubility of a compound in olive oil and its propensity for crossing biological membranes. I'm having trouble understanding exactly why their conclusions are earth-shattering.
At the turn of the last century, Meyer (1899) and Overton (1901) independently conducted experiments to demonstrate that the longer the carbon chain of a molecule, the better it partitioned into olive…